How to Start Using Generative AI in Sales

Most sales teams follow a structured but heavily manual process. The challenging part is that each stage requires a different level of engagement and prioritisation.

Here’s how a traditional sales process looks and the common pain points teams come across.

It can be difficult to keep up with every lead across your pipeline, especially at busy businesses, where you might have more than 50 companies you need to keep tabs on. On top of this, you’re always hunting for the next deal through outbound methods.

As a result, your time is scattered, and deals can easily slip through the cracks. This might be that you forgot to respond to an email, or you could have had a better demo meeting if you had more time to research the company. This happens every day and puts a cap on how much revenue a salesperson can reasonably generate.

Generative AI allows you to be everywhere at once. It shifts the sales process from being reactive and manual to data-driven, proactive, and automated. This means that outreach can be personalised at scale, meetings are summarised instantly, next steps are suggested automatically, and admin work happens in the background.

To understand how this could impact your work, it helps to compare how each stage of the workflow could be supported.

In this process, your salespeople still own and build relationships with customers, but with more support in the background.

As we’ve shown, generative AI can help across all the tasks a salesperson has to do. Below, we’ll look more closely at how this type of AI can support content generation, insight generation, workflow automation, and conversational intelligence in practice.

Writing follow-ups, proposals, summaries, and meeting notes takes a lot of time away from salespeople that they could be using to engage with prospects.

Generative AI can help by drafting emails, proposals, customer insights in plain English, and call summaries based on real context from your conversations. Instead of staring at a blank page, reps can get a draft that they can then work from.

It also enables personalised outreach at scale, where you can leave sections that the AI will fill with messaging that reflects the prospect’s role, company, and behaviour. Typically, this level of detail was reserved for only the most important prospects, but now everyone can get the white-glove treatment.

Sales decisions are only as good as the data behind them. The challenge is pulling that data together in a usable way. AI helps by compiling account research, highlighting key signals, and suggesting next-best actions based on deal activity. It can also help surface risks, identify engaged stakeholders, and point reps towards where to focus.

When paired with platforms like Data 360, these insights become more reliable, as they’re built on unified, real-time data.

A large portion of sales work is low-value admin. This could be updating the CRM, scheduling meetings, answering pricing questions or managing pipeline stages. All of these are necessary for the role, but not a good use of human intelligence.

AI reduces that load by automatically logging activity, drafting updates, and highlighting the top deals to focus on. This keeps all your data current without relying on reps to manually input everything after the fact. This allows anyone to see at a glance what the deal is, including who the customer is and what stage they are at.

Sales conversations are where deals are won or lost, but capturing and acting on what’s said isn’t always consistent.

To keep communication sharp and targeted, AI can analyse calls, generate summaries, surface key moments like objections or buying signals, and prompt reps with relevant follow-up actions. It can also highlight gaps in the conversation or suggest areas to explore further based on patterns across similar deals.

To learn more, read our article on sales enablement.

Using generative AI drives measurable outcomes across the entire sales process, from how reps spend their time to how effectively they close. Here are the benefits you can expect after implementing it at your organisation.

• Increased productivity: Less time spent on admin and research means that reps can focus on the human side of selling. Currently, sales professionals spend 16% of their time on preparation and planning, which AI can help reduce.

• Less follow-up work: Automated summaries and faster follow-ups can all be enabled by generative AI. This keeps deals moving without constant manual work.
• Revenue growth: Better targeting and prioritisation help reps focus on the right opportunities. We found that high performers are 1.7x more likely than underperformers to use prospecting agents.
• Higher conversion rates: Consistent follow-ups and more relevant messaging all help lift the number of prospects that move through the pipeline.
• Personalisation at scale: You can achieve tailored messaging based on role, behaviour, or context, without any extra effort.
• Improved prospect experience: Prospects like to receive fast responses and relevant information. This reduces the likelihood of them moving their focus to another company.
• Forecast accuracy: More reliable, data-driven predictions based on real pipeline activity rather than static inputs. This allows you to forecast future revenue and make informed operational decisions.

• Sales training: Using generative AI coaches, you can get your new people up to speed faster and provide them with more consistent feedback.

AI can give you a great head start on your work. It gets things started so you can spend more time on high-value activities instead of getting bogged down in drudgery. Here’s how.

First things first: Make sure your generative AI is integrated with your CRM software. Salesforce Platform is built into Agentforce Sales to give you a seamless experience based on trusted data.

Sellers spend hours each week crafting emails that are personalised, targeted, and meaningful. Generative AI is poised to take this task on. It does this by writing personalised emails through studying customer information already stored in your system.

This information includes the history of your customer interactions, the products that your prospect is interested in or has already bought, and even data from previous conversations. The result is that a sales rep can write emails faster without sacrificing quality.

Establishing trust with a prospect during a discovery call will always be a deeply human process. Reps can read tone and build rapport in ways AI can’t replicate. Where generative AI helps instead is in capturing and structuring things like key themes, objections, and gaps in the conversation.

With generative AI, you can use text-based prompts in presentation tools to create tailored decks and pitches in minutes. It can enhance presentations by providing dynamic, data-driven content adjustments and analysing audience reactions and engagement metrics.

Generative AI can also make on-the-fly suggestions to improve the presentation’s focus and generate visual aids and personalised talking points.

Sales reps can spend huge parts of their day generating, pulling, and analysing data — and with so much to look at, it’s easy to miss big-win deal opportunities.

Generative AI acts like a personal data analyst to uncover patterns and relationships in your CRM data almost instantaneously, pointing you toward high-value deals and those likely to close. Even better, it adapts to changing customer information in real time, helping you modify your sales approach to make it more effective.

Generative AI has revolutionised sales lead scoring and prioritisation. It analyses vast amounts of data to identify high-potential prospects. Then the AI evaluates customer behaviour, engagement levels, and historical data to assign accurate lead scores. This way, reps can focus on the prospects that are most likely to close.

Chatbots can help streamline initial customer interactions. These generative AI-driven tools can provide instant, accurate responses to inquiries, qualify leads, and gather essential customer information. By pulling important details to pass on to human reps, these virtual assistants maximise sellers’ time so they can focus on more complex issues.

You can now teach and coach every rep the techniques of your top rep. Ramp up new hires fast by incorporating your specific value props and related information from your CRM alongside successful sales calls and circulating best-in-class techniques across the team. Create milestone-based sales programs that deliver outcomes.

Follow generative AI regulations to ensure the use of AI complies with data privacy regulations. Put guidelines into place to make sure the AI-generated content created for your team is used ethically.

Monitor the performance of your new generative AI tools and their impact on sales metrics, such as conversion rates and lead response times. Collect feedback from your sales team and customers to identify areas for improvement. Regularly update and retrain generative AI tools with new data to ensure they remain effective and accurate.

To get consistent results from generative AI, it needs to be applied with a clear goal in mind. These best practices can help you ensure it supports your sales process rather than adding more complexity.

• Start with high-impact use cases: When getting started, focus on areas where AI can immediately support your team’s effort or improve outcomes, such as post-meeting emails, call summaries, or prospect research.
• Keep humans in the loop: Reps should stay in control of decisions and relationships, with AI acting as support rather than replacement.
• Maintain data quality: AI is only as reliable as the data behind it, so clean, up-to-date data is a must-have for useful outputs.
• Continuously optimise: Review how AI is being used across the team and refine your prompts and workflows based on feedback.
• Connect AI use to revenue goals: Tie the use of AI back to tangible metrics like pipeline growth and conversion rates to ensure it’s delivering measurable impact.

By starting with focused use cases and expanding based on what works, you can embed AI into your sales process in a way that strengthens how your team sells.

The Adecco Group is a recruitment company operating in Australia and New Zealand, placing talent for large enterprises. Each year, they receive around 300 million applications. Due to this volume, they found it difficult to engage everyone and keep top talent on their radar for future roles.

To solve this, they implemented AI through Agentforce and Data 360 to automatically summarise conversations and keep every applicant engaged with personalised updates and role suggestions.

As a result, recruiters reduced time spent on admin and were able to focus more on client relationships, prioritising roles, and filling positions faster. This is intended to provide 1:1 support for 100% of applicants.